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Comment by dundercoder | Hacker News Reader

That is a good point.

Thank you dundercoder for sharing your experiences, would be very interested in the adaptations you made to your working environment as your eyesight failed. It also got me thinking about my own locale, and I would agree with volkl48. I live in Walla Walla, WA now, which has three colleges and a very walkable downtown. Sounds like you have kids, and we have reasonable public schools. It's a 45 minute flight to Seattle. There is a public bus system that covers much of the area; surprising for a US city of only 30,000 people. Really though you can cover the entire downtown area on foot. Sounds like as a suburbanite it might be more your speed over a metro area.

I still have some central vision, maybe 20 degrees field of view, so I can still see my laptop screen ok. I had to ditch my two 27” monitors because I’d get vertigo looking between them (usually hunting for the mouse pointer)

I crank up the text size so large my neighbors can read it, but not so big that it exceeds my visual field.

I use a screen reader to read docs. I’m super excited about the new AI powered narrators because listening to ANY of the older style readers for 30 seconds or more causes permanent rage conditions.

I tried Braille, but it’s like trying to be instantly productive using vim, in Chinese, while on the space shuttle during launch. I might return to it sometime because narrated code is horrible to listen to.

I really recommend Braille, even if you are not blind. You might be underestimating the time it takes to learn though Chinese is easy.

Regarding the new AI powered narrators, do you have any recommendations already?

Try cranking the speed up on the synthesized speech. There are blind listeners that listen to synthesized speech at much higher rates, 600-800 wpm and up. If you crank up the speed a bit, it would probably help differentiate between normal speech where you have greater expectations on how it should sound, and something that's almost a different language.

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